As the profession of Health Information Management has grown over the past two decades so has the need for quality data. In addition to data validation edits at the national level, provincial health ministries are requiring additional checks to improve data standards, as well as quality checks that are requested at the facility level. The result is that analysts are spending more and more time each month running reports to uncover errors, gaps and inconsistencies in the data.
Edits Management Tool (EMT) put the power of data validation in the hands of the coders. The Edit Engine module provides WinRecs users with an intuitive interface that enables health records professionals to define and create their own data edits without requiring expert knowledge in report writing tools. And, because the Edit Engine is integrated with WinRecs, any new edits that are created are flagged at the time of abstracting. This makes the validation process more efficient and prevents coders from having to re-access and re-familiarize themselves with previously abstracted charts at month-end to make changes and corrections.
Create Your Own Rules
The WinRecs Edit Engine allows any WinRecs user with assigned permission to create a new edit. User-defined edits are created for a given care type (AmCare, Inpatient) and are ran alongside other embedded edits so all record validation happens in one step. Field Condition Rules are created to compare an abstract field against a value or group of values or against another field while Logical Condition Rules let you group field conditions together using logical operators (AND/ OR) to create highly specific edits. Flexible and powerful, the Edit Engine module lets you create any edit — from a simple comparison to the most involved expression — and flag these as critical issues, errors, warnings or information in the abstract to alert coders to potential data issues.
Benefits
- Improves department efficiency by reducing the need for coders to re-access records to make corrections and changes
- Edits Management Tool (EMT) are noted with a different icon so they’re easily identified and distinguished from system-wide or CIHI-defined edits
- Reduces the need to run daily, monthly and quarterly data quality reports
- Supports multiple levels of edits from Hospital Information to Hospital Warning to Hospital Critical
- Improves autonomy
